Two massive lenticular galaxies, NGC 2292 and NGC 2293, got too close in the distant past , and gravity caused them to eventually merge into a giant galaxy about 120 million light-years away in the constellation Canis Major.
Both galaxies were discovered by the English astronomer John Herschel (son of William Herschel) on January 20, 1835.
"If you mix two fried eggs, you get something like scrambled eggs. The same is true of collisions of galaxies throughout the universe," said the Hubble astronomers. "They lose their flattened spiral disk and the stars mix in a volume of space. shaped like a soccer ball, forming an elliptical galaxy; But these two interacting are a very rare example of what a bigger fried egg can lead to: the construction of a giant spiral galaxy. "
"It may depend on the specific trajectory that the colliding pair of galaxies follows. The scene of the encounter must be weird, because there are only a handful of other examples in the universe," the Hubble telescope experts continue.
What will happen to these massive galaxies?
They will eventually merge into a giant luminous spiral galaxy like UGC 2885, the Rubin galaxy, which is more than twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy.
Reference: NASA / ESA / HUBBLE
